Tangential Product Audience Map
Find overlapping customer ecosystems and co-market through them.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 97%
This framework converts customer knowledge into a map of adjacent distribution opportunities. The company asks customers which other products they use, builds a list of those products, estimates their audience sizes, and evaluates where meaningful audience overlap exists. It then prioritizes complementary rather than competing products and proposes joint offerings, integrations, bundles, or campaigns that expose each partner to the other’s relevant users. The approach begins manually so the company can validate fit, economics, and messaging before creating a formal partner channel. Its mechanism is customer evidence leading to an ecosystem map, the map revealing shared audiences, and shared audiences enabling lower-friction go-to-market partnerships with companies already trusted by the target market.
Origin
Extracted from Marketing Against The Grain as part of Kieran Flanagan’s proposed strategy after learning deeply from an initial customer community.
Core principles
- 01Existing customers reveal adjacent distribution channels.
- 02Audience overlap makes partnerships more relevant.
- 03Tangential products can co-bundle without directly competing.
- 04Manual validation should precede a scaled partner program.
How to run it
- 1
Interview Current Customers
Ask which products, services, and ecosystems they use alongside yours to complete the broader job.
Pro tip Ask what they used immediately before and after your product in their workflow.
Watch out Do not rely only on internal assumptions about adjacent tools.
- 2
Build the Ecosystem List
Create a structured inventory of the named products, their use cases, and estimated audience sizes.
Pro tip Record how frequently each product appears across customers.
Watch out Audience size without workflow relevance can be misleading.
- 3
Measure Overlap and Fit
Identify products with substantial shared audiences, complementary value, and low direct competitive risk.
Pro tip Prioritize partners whose users encounter the problem immediately adjacent to your use case.
Watch out A famous partner with weak overlap may produce little qualified demand.
- 4
Design a Joint Offer
Create a co-bundle, integration, template, event, or campaign that delivers genuine combined value.
Pro tip Make the benefit understandable without explaining both products separately.
Watch out Do not treat the partnership as a simple email-list swap.
- 5
Validate Manually
Run a limited joint go-to-market test and measure adoption, qualified leads, and customer value.
Pro tip Agree on attribution and responsibilities before launch.
Watch out Operational ambiguity can damage the partner relationship.
- 6
Scale the Proven Channel
Repeat with the highest-performing partners and formalize processes only after the motion demonstrates value.
Pro tip Develop a repeatable partner qualification scorecard.
Watch out Scaling too early creates a large but unproductive partnership portfolio.
In the wild
An analytics product discovers that many customers also use the same mid-market CRM. The companies create an integration, shared reporting templates, and a joint webinar showing how the combined workflow improves pipeline analysis.
→ Both products gain qualified exposure to an overlapping audience through a credible combined use case.
Common mistakes
Choosing Partners by Fame
Large audience size matters only when the audience overlaps with the product’s buyers and use case.
Ignoring Combined Value
A partnership without a useful joint outcome feels promotional and gives customers little reason to act.
Is it for you?
Best for
Companies that know their customers well and can offer complementary value alongside adjacent products.
Not ideal for
Businesses without active customers, a clear use case, or enough operational capacity to support partner campaigns.
From the transcript
“I get someone to build me out a list of all of the products those customers use. I get them to show me all of…”
“So now I'm gonna go to market with all of the other products that are tangential to mine that though audience love.”
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